A Synthesizing Mind: A Memoir from the Creator of Multiple Intelligences Theory - Hardcover

Gardner, Howard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262044269 ISBN 13: 9780262044264

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2020

Synopsis

An authority on the human mind reflects on his intellectual development, his groundbreaking work, and different types of intelligences—including his own.

Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind was that rare publishing phenomenon—a mind-changer. Widely read by the general public as well as by educators, this influential book laid out Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. It debunked the primacy of the IQ test and inspired new approaches to education; entire curricula, schools, museums, and parents' guides were dedicated to the nurturing of the several intelligences. In his new book, A Synthesizing Mind, Gardner reflects on his intellectual development and his groundbreaking work, tracing his evolution from bookish child to eager college student to disengaged graduate student to Harvard professor.

Gardner discusses his mentors (including Erik Erikson and Jerome Bruner) and his collaborators (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, William Damon, and others). Comedian Groucho Marx makes a surprise (non-)appearance, declining Gardner's invitation to chat with Harvard College students, in favor of “making a living.”

Throughout his career, Gardner has focused on human minds in general, or on the minds of particular creators and leaders. Reflecting now on his own mind, he concludes that his is a “synthesizing mind”—with the ability to survey experiences and data across a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. The thinkers he most admires—including historian Richard Hofstadter, biologist Charles Darwin, and literary critic Edmund Wilson—are exemplary synthesizers. Gardner contends that the synthesizing mind is particularly valuable at this time and proposes ways to cultivate a possibly unique human capacity.

About this title

About the Author

Howard Gardner is John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Best known as the originator of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, he is the author of thirty books, including Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences; Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed; and The App Generation (with Katie Davis).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

We can’t do the experiment, but I am convinced that I would not be writing this memoir, and would not have achieved a certain degree of notoriety if I had chosen some other noun: seven capacities; or seven competences; or seven kinds of minds, recalling the book that I had outlined some years earlier; or seven talents or seven gifts, or even, to use a phrase I detest, seven learning styles. No, with little doubt, it was by virtue of the decision to beg, borrow, seize, or steal the word intelligence that I caught the attention of so many readers, including the then all powerful members of the so-called chattering classes.
Ever since Alfred Binet (1857–1911), a great French psychologist, the use of the word “intelligence” and the instrument called the “intelligence quotient test” or the “IQ test” has taken on a special, even sacred meaning in much of the Western world. We want to be intelligent ourselves; we want to know and befriend people who are intelligent; and above all, we want our children to be intelligent.
How best to convey that capacity to the world? Take a short-answer, multiple-choice style test, tote up the right and wrong answers, and compare your performance with that of peers. If you do about as well as others in your cohort, you’ll be called average. If you do better, say by a standard deviation, you’ll be called smart; and if you don’t do as well as your peers, you’ll be called dull, dumb, or, to be more politically correct, a bit on the slow side or “very nice.” And if you are two or three standard deviations away from the mean of the group, you’ll be hailed as a “genius” at one end of the bell curve or dismissed as an “imbecile” or an “idiot” at the other, less happy end of the curve. The devising and administration of the intelligence tests turns out to be a notable achievement of psychological measurement, but also a perilous one.
As a scholar, having settled on a noun, I also needed a definition of what constituted an intelligence. Over the years, I have tinkered with the exact wording of that definition. But in Frames of Mind, first published in 1983, I put forth my thinking in informal terms: “A human intellectual competence must entail a set of skills of problem solving—enabling the individual to resolve genuine problems or difficulties that he or she encounters, and, when appropriate, to create an effective product—and must entail the potential for finding or creating problems—hereby laying the groundwork for the acquisition of new knowledge” (62).
Looking back nearly four decades, I am relieved that I was appropriately modest in my claims for the definition and the criteria of an intelligence: “Ultimately it would certainly be desirable to have an algorithm for the selection of an intelligence . . . at present, however, it must be admitted that the selection (or rejection) of a candidate intelligence is reminiscent more of an artistic judgment than of a scientific assessment . . . where my procedure does take a scientific turn is in the making public of the grounds for the judgment, so that other investigators can review the evidence and draw their own conclusions” (Frames of Mind, 63).
I had thrown down the gauntlet: Goodbye, or even good riddance, to a single intelligence as probed by the ubiquitous IQ test; greetings to multiple intelligences, modes of assessment yet to be determined. I would soon see how the world would react to the words and claims in the new and perhaps daring synthesis that I was putting forth.

Edition details

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262044269
• ISBN 13: 9780262044264
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304